Radio in RJW?

[String]

How widely were radios used in RJW? Did ships have sets on them?

[Jim Cobb]

The RN used radios in 1899 and 1900 on manuevers. Therefore, radio telegraphy may have been possible but not probable.

[SunScream]

Some of the Japanese ships would have had a radio set, and _possibly_ some Russian vessels, but nothing in smaller ships or destroyers.
I have photos of the armoured cruiser Asama sporting what appears to be a single wire aerial between the masts. Likewise PC Takasago. The battleship Asahi has a similar wire. However in the photos is their any sign of a wireless shack, so they may just be some other rigging. There is plenty of photos showing bunting streaming from wire high up on the topmasts, but the ones I am talking about are lower down.


Wireless transmissions would emphatically NOT be used in battle to coordinate attacks. All signalling was done by flag or lights.

[Bullethead]

Some of the Japanese ships would have had a radio set, and _possibly_ some Russian vessels, but nothing in smaller ships or destroyers.

A while back, there was a thread here about the 1st occasions of electronic warfare, which was radio jamming in the RJW. There are a couple of different stories out there, but they agree that both sides had radios on at least some ships and ashore as well, and that they tried to jam each other.

Wireless transmissions would emphatically NOT be used in battle to coordinate attacks. All signalling was done by flag or lights.

It was so even in WW1 and for some time beyond. Shipboard radios of that time period were all Morse, not voice, and because all of them everywhere used more or less the same few frequencies, messages all had to be coded. Plus the radio rooms were mostly aftermarket add-ons in the ships of the day, so instead of being integrated into the command spaces of the bridge area, they were often stuck some distance away.

Thus, the process of sending a radio message in those days was for the officer on the bridge of Ship A to write his message down on paper and hand it to a runner, who carried it to the radio room. There, the message was encoded by hand, then transmitted in Morse. On receiving Ship B, the message was written down as the Morse transmission was received, then decoded by hand, checked, and finally hand-carried up to the officer on the bridge. It usually took like 15 minutes or more between the hand-off on the bridge of Ship A and the final receipt on the bridge of Ship B. This was, of course, totally impractical for real-time battlefield coordination.

My father, who was a naval radioman (and later radarman) in WW2 tells me that in the USN, tactical, short-range voice radio (TBS: Talk Between Ships) was a pretty new-fangled thing in his day.

[WallysWorld]

Richard Connaughton in his book "Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear" wrote the Japanese had first rate wireless while the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron had poorer quality German-made wireless.

[Vigilante]

Radio was first used in battle by the Japanese fleet scouting at Tsushima. Richard Hough's The Fleet that had to Die (1958) relates that the Japanese transmissions were intercepted by Rozhdestvenski's fleet, so I assume that the Russians at least had radio reception capability.

[Daedalus]

I was reading about this, and yes they did have Radios on some of the larger ships.
The Russians where using A few German sets of very good quality and also some sets made in a Country in Europe of unknown Origin. They used this sets to Radio in where they where, and where they made contact at, it was the first major use of radio in a war. The sets where quite large and where a real pain to run. It took a Radio Crew just to do this. I am looking for a download so I can post it here so all can read, If I get time I will try to get this posted soon.

[Mobeer]

Take a read of Rasplata (The reckoning) by Commander Wladimir Semenoff, p293. This describes attempts to use radio in the Baltic.

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mtfgc&fileName=0009//mtfgc0009.db&recNum=292&itemLink=r%3Fintldl%2Fmtfront%3A%40field%28NUMBER% 2B%40od1%28mtfgc%2B0009%29%29&linkText=0